| Welcome to our twenty-fourth monthly newsletter, which will be the last one on the last day of 2024. We have kept our promise of only one newsletter a month. The New Website This month we are introducing our new website, which is still accessible at Cosguide4travel.com. As we mentioned previously, we have been getting several messages from professional marketing firms that, while they believe we have some great content on our website, we needed changes to make it more searchable on Google and other search engines. So, we had a contest to see who might do the best job for us, and we engaged a firm called HFB Technologies out of St. George, Utah, near Zion National Park, to tackle the project. We appreciate you, our loyal followers. However, if we want to achieve our mission of helping educate more people about the wonderful world of travel, we realize we need to expand our reach to more interested travelers. Hiring a website development and marketing firm to reposition the website was a logical way to achieve our goal. SEO, or search engine optimization, improves a website’s ranking on search engines. Therefore, with the assistance of HFB Technologies, we restructured the website and just started enhancing its SEO. The new website has a much cleaner design and will be even easier to navigate. With over 100 individual blog posts, there is a lot of material on the website that was brought over and is in the process of being updated. Please take a few minutes to check out the new website and let us know your reaction to the change. Just email Cos at the email address at the bottom of the newsletter. Passports In September, I told you we would be updating our passport post to explain the new process for renewing your passport online. I received some positive feedback from one of our readers about how the process worked and how they got their new passports quickly. A new updated Passport post on the website will be accessible from the homepage, focusing on the latest online process. Unfortunately, working with the new web development team, other aspects of the website took priority this month. Therefore, our New Year’s Resolution #2 is to get the Passport Post updated in January. It is our #2 resolution after “#1 Dry January.” Future Travel Our 2025 travel plans include a spring, a summer, and a fall trip. The spring trip, 75 days long, starts in February with a flight to Mumbai, India, via Abu Dhabi. From Mumbai, we are taking a 48-day cruise starting in Mumbai and ending in Tokyo, Japan. In addition to India and Japan, we will visit Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, Vietnam, Taiwan, and South Korea. We are heading home from Tokyo via stops in Sapien, Guam, and Kauai, Hawaii. We will also visit NYC twice, one in July and the second for the US Open in late August. We have become fans of the US Tennis Open, and this will be our third year in a row of attending. After the August trip to NYC, we plan to drive up the coast of Maine. Our post, “Maine in August: Best Lobsters and Lighthouses,” provides an excellent 10-day road trip recommendation up the Maine Coast. Please check it out and let us know if you might plan to make such a trip. In July, we will join friends for a cruise through the Baltics and Norway. We will be visiting a number of the Baltic Countries as a couple for the first time including Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Germany for a return visit. Finally, in October, we will be making our third trip on the Danube River. This time, we are starting in Budapest, but we will head east to see Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania, completing our visits to all Balkan Countries except Moldovia. We are saving Moldovia for another day when it might be safe to also visit the Ukraine. Anyway, here’s praying our health holds up so we can enjoy all this excellent travel next year. Once we complete these trips, we will be full-fledged members of the Travelers Century Club, which recognizes people who have visited at least one hundred different countries. Our June trip to NYC is to attend a TCC Americas meeting. Paul Cosgrave
Cos@cosguide4travel.com
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